What's new in IBM Business Process Manager V7.5.1

IBM® Business Process Manager V7.5.1 brings case management integration, expanded BPMN 2.0 support, event-driven subprocesses, and a host of other features to the IBM Business Process Manager 7.5 product.

Read about these and other additions in the following sections, which correspond to the components of the product.

Process Designer

The following installation improvements have been added in this release for IBM Process Designer:

When you download and install Process Designer from the Process Center, Process Designer is now always at the version level that is required by the Process Center.
You can install a new version of Process Designer on top of an existing version to move it to the correct level.
Error handling for the Process Designer installation has been improved and installation errors and warnings are recorded in a log file.

Process App Settings editor

The new Process App Settings editor provides easy access to the settings of process applications and toolkits. You can view and change global settings, environment variables, and server configurations for your process application.

Expanded adoption of the BPMN 2.0 specification

The business process definitions in IBM Business Process Manager support the Common Executable subclass of the BPMN 2.0 Process Modeling conformance class, which addresses executable BPMN models.

Process Designer now uses standard BPMN 2.0 graphical notation.
The simplified palette is easier to use.
The following BPMN 2.0 constructs have been added:
- A full set of message events provides more explicit modeling and simplified implementation of event operations.
- Event gateways wait for one or more message or timer events to determine the subsequent flow.
- Event subprocesses simplify implementation of asynchronous workflow driven by message, timer, or error events.
You can no longer drop intermediate error events into an empty space in the diagram and link to them with sequence flow lines. In their place, you can either drop intermediate error events onto activities or use error event subprocesses. Diagrams created in previous versions are migrated as-is and their intermediate error events continue to function as before.
After you have opened a linked process or a subprocess in IBM Process Portal, you can now use breadcrumbs to return to the parent process.
The BPMN 2.0 import provides improved traceability and search and gives you access to rich industry content through intelligent import operations.
With the new BPMN 2.0 export, you can share your artifacts with colleagues who use other tools to develop their BPMN 2.0 models.

For more information about the BPMN 2.0 support provided in V7.5.1, see "BPMN 2.0" in the related links.

Case management integration

Business process management and case management are complementary ways of solving business problems. Business process management uses a sequence of activities to reach a result, whereas case management focuses on an issue and all documents related to it. This release adds an IBM Case Manager integration service, which lets IBM Business Process Manager Advanced and IBM Case Manager interact.

Manage tasks from both IBM Business Process Manager Advanced and IBM Case Manager from one inbox. In Business Space, the integrated inbox displays a federated task list that contains tasks and work items from IBM BPM and IBM Case Manager. With the integrated inbox, business users can configure and customize the task list. Business Space is shipped with IBM Business Process Manager Advanced as well as IBM Case Manager.
Implement an IBM Case Manager case task as an IBM BPM process.
Create an IBM Case Manager integration service to access case management cases from a business process. You can create a case instance of a case type, search for cases, update cases, and retrieve a case. At run time, cases are hosted on IBM Case Manager and business processes are hosted on IBM Business Process Manager.
Use Business Space on IBM Case Manager with IBM Sametime configured to enable business users to collaborate with each other while working on tasks and processes.

For more information about case management integration in business processes, see "Building an IBM Case Manager Integration service" and "Building spaces for integrating with IBM Case Manager" in the related links.

Advanced Integration services

Improved integration between Process Designer and Integration Designer allows you to easily synchronize Advanced Integration services between the two development environments. You can emulate an implemented Advanced Integration service, which means that you do not actually need to run the service during playback.

Improved asset management

Refactor assets into toolkits.
Generate and publish process documentation.
Compare changes between two versions, side by side.
Manage active process instances within Process Server more easily from a web-based Process Inspector without requiring a connection to Process Center. See the "Process Inspector" subsection of this topic.

Coach Toolbar Preview

This new toolbar promotes team collaboration on task instances in Process Portal.

See the participating team members from an interactive process diagram.
View conversations about task instances and post inquiries and responses.
Request assistance from team members with expertise in a specific task instance subject area.

Support and troubleshooting

Collectors for IBM Support Assistant have been built into the product to help identify problems.

Integration Designer

The prerequisite checks for installing Integration Designer have been improved to give you more information about how to fix problems.

Process Center and Process Server

Installation

The following installation improvements have been added:

The typical installation can now discover the latest available fixes and upgrade Process Server to the latest refresh pack and interim fix level automatically. If you want these upgrades to be installed from a local directory instead, or if you want to specify the fix level, you can use a properties file to tell IBM Installation Manager where to find the upgrades and which upgrades to install.
Prerequisite checks give you more information about how to fix problems.

This release adds a scripted cluster installation.

Configuration

To configure a typical network deployment environment, you can use the new configureNode command instead of using the Profile Management tool and deployment environment wizard or the manageprofiles and wsadmin commands. You can also use configureNode later to extend the deployment environment. For more information and examples, see "Configuring the deployment environment using the configureNode command" in the related links.

Security

The following security improvements have been added in this release:

Internal messaging buses are secure by default.
Fine-grained authorization has been added for business process definition (BPD) process instance management (Process App deployment security).
You can define administrative credentials using BPM_Admin_Auth_Alias. The hardcoded tw_* user IDs and passwords have been removed.

This release adds support for Windows authentication. If you are using an SQL Server database, you can connect to your database using your Windows authentication information.

Process Inspector

This release provides a Process Inspector in the Process Admin Console so that you can view and manage process instances for process applications that are running on a specific process server.

A process status summary provides a quick view of information about multiple process instances. You can embed the process status summary in a dashboard or portal to help you aggregate status information from multiple servers or systems. You can view detailed information about individual process instances and take certain immediate actions on the process instances that are displayed to quickly investigate and resolve problems.

Remove durable subscription messages from your database: Using the BPMDeleteDurableMessages command, you can remove old durable subscription messages from the LSW_DUR_MSG_RECEIVED database table. You can use this capability to trim the size of the table periodically. See BPMDeleteDurableMessages.

Process Server

New administrative command to help you maintain the integrity of your BPM environment: To delete process application snapshots and their dependencies, use the BPMDeleteSnapshot command. See BPMDeleteSnapshot command.

Process Center

Process documentation view

You can view or print information about a snapshot of a process application or toolkit. You can generate a report about the process application or toolkit or about an asset of the process application or toolkit. Here are some of the benefits of documenting processes:

Share and review high-level information with a business user.
Document milestones in the design and development of a process application for audit purposes.
Examine the changes that occurred between two snapshots of a process application.

You can delete unnamed and archived snapshots of a process application using the new BPMSnapshotCleanup command. See Deleting unneeded snapshots from a Process Center server.

Process Portal

Configure the My Team Performance scoreboard: Process Portal administrators can set which tasks are visible to team managers and the maximum number of tasks that is displayed in the task list. For more information about the configuration, see Configuring the My Team Performance scoreboard.

Performance Data Warehouse

Control the size of the Performance Data Warehouse

Delete records from the Performance Data Warehouse by using the new prune command, which is part of the Performance Data Warehouse tool (perfDWTool). By pruning records that you no longer need, you can keep the Performance Data Warehouse from becoming too large.

For more information about perfDWTool, see Using the Performance Data Warehouse command-line tool (perfDWTool).

For specific information about the prune command, see Pruning data from the Performance Data Warehouse database.

Process Admin Console

Process Monitor improvements

Improvements to the aggregation and display of information:
- The cluster member to which the information belongs is displayed in the Process Monitor console.
- The duration reported for a process instance and its steps also includes the duration of services.
- The task type (for example, Script) is displayed beside the task execution time.
- JMX: ProcessMonitor MBean improvements:
  - The MBean is bound to a fixed scope (ENVIRONMENT_SERVER); it was previously bound to the class loader hash key.
  - The MBean has four new operations to return the set of monitor data for process instances and stand-alone services, including methods that return filtered data in XML or JSON format.
  - The MBean has two new methods; haltProcess() to halt a process and haltService() to halt a service.
  For more information, see ProcessMonitorMBean.
Instrumentation enhancements:
- You can save the instrumentation XML for further analysis by clicking Save in the Instrumentation page.
- You can track service requests per process application.
- JMX: InstrumentationManager MBean improvements:
  - The MBean is bound to a fixed scope (ENVIRONMENT_SERVER or ENVIRONMENT_PERFORMANCE_SERVER), where previously it was bound to the class loader hash key.
  - The MBean has four new operations to return an XML and JSON document with the set user-visible instrumentations or all instrumentations.
  - For more information, see InstrumentationManagerMBean.
Improved documentation that includes example scripts on connecting to Process Monitor from JConsole, and information about interpreting Process Monitor data. See Monitoring processes and services.